UNITED NATIONS, September 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The United States threatened Monday, September 23, to veto a draft resolution before the United Nations Security Council calling on Israel to lift its siege of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Headquarters.

The permanent representative of Palestine to the U.N., Nasser Al-Kidwa, had earlier asked the council to adopt "a clear resolution" demanding that Israel withdraw immediately from Arafat's Headquarters in Ramallah in the West Bank.

But the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, claimed the text was unacceptable because it did not also condemn Palestinian resistance attacks against Israeli civilians.

"We will not support the adoption of a one-sided text that fails to recognize that this conflict has two sides," Negroponte told a public session of the council.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan began the council meeting with an appeal to Israelis and Palestinians to abandon the "bankrupt policy" of trying to force each other to capitulate.

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not going to be resolved by military might alone, or by violent means of any kind," Annan said.

"A policy based on forcing the other side to capitulate is a bankrupt policy. It is not working, and it will never work. It only encourages desperation. It weakens moderates and strengthens extremists," he added.

All 15 council members, 19 other countries and Kidwa were due to speak in the meeting, called at the request of the Arab group of nations.

"Additional Security Council resolutions, particularly one-sided ones, are more than unhelpful; they are counter-productive," Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Yehuda Lancry, told the council.

Resolutions which failed to condemn retaliatory Palestinian operations inside Israel in the strongest terms were an incentive to terrorists, he went on.

But Kidwa said the Palestinian leadership condemned such attacks.

Moreover, he said, the first such bombing took place in 1994, after 27 years of Israeli occupation and the transfer of 350,000 settlers to Palestinian territory.

"The occupation and its ugly practices have not come as a result of suicide bombings and did not continue because of them," he said: "actually it created them."

In Cairo earlier, the 22 members of the Arab League called on Annan and the U.N. "to step in immediately to stop the continuing Israeli barbaric aggression" against the Palestinians.

They also called on the U.N. Security Council to "take a decision compelling Israel to halt its aggression on the Palestinian people and its national leadership."

Annan recalled that last week, he and the other members of the so-called international Quartet met at U.N. headquarters and "agreed on the need for a road map to achieve a permanent settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

The bombing of a Palestinian school and the two ensuing retaliatory attacks in Israel in the past few days had been "a tragic step in the opposite direction," he said.

Annan appealed again to all Palestinians "especially the leaders of all political factions," to renounce their resistance operations "clearly and irrevocably, now and forever."

Palestinians must understand that "there will be no settlement without lasting security for Israel," he said.

At the same time, Annan appealed to Israel "to refrain from policies and actions that are in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention" on protecting civilians in time of war.

The British ambassador to the United Nations, Jeremy Greenstock, said the world was "close to disgust" that Israeli and Palestinian leaders could not see that there was no military solution to the conflict.

"The international community cannot impose peace," Greenstock said.